• AT-43
/
• ONI
/
• Products

Daimyo John Priest: Humanity’s most dangerous sales rep

Design: Priest, a hero you’ll love to hate

His name is banal yet symbolic. Mothers want him for their daughters but you know he is bad to the bone. John Priest is certainly ONI’s most emblematic character.
John Priest was born in the first minutes we discussed the overall design of ONI. Everyone at the Rackham Entertainment editorial meeting smiled in agreement as we described his attitude, his clothing and his function. Like ONI, this guy is the unholy son of financial scandal, uncontrolled speculation and the economic crisis.

The truth is Priest is even older than ONI. Everybody has known him from a long time: this is the kind of guy who started off forcing grannies’ doorways and is now buying off the poorer countries debts by taking over their natural resources for a symbolical (Avan) dollar. You and your friends already blamed him. You called him names the first time you found out about credit card fees. You heard his name on TV during the credit crunch. He is the embodiment of capitalism. Priest is more than a monster: he works in finance.

But John Priest is not only a face, he also come with game effects!

We found ourselves with a literally white collar hero armed with a bb gun and leading an army of zombies. To avoid creating a fragile and lame character, we got down to work on some abilities that would make him interesting on the battlefield.
As usual the dumb old ideas always come to mind first. So: Exit the experimental trench coat produced by the same factory as the fiannas’ armored G-string. No laser pointing rifle to call godlike nuclear strikes. And no 70’s-like disintegrator beam (Flash, ah-aaaah !).
We were just done with the cogs and pretty satisfied with their forcefield. We were onto something, with ONI being financially powerful enough to trade for this new technology.

We were also proud of ONI vehicles. They were original. Though fragile, they pack weapons one category above their class. The Medium Destroyer seemed the perfect all-rounder for the perfect sales rep. This seemed a natural choice.
We had (god…finally) finished Operation Frostbite and its new heroes were more interesting than the first ones the game had. We sought to keep the fun going and worked on providing Limo’, John Priest’s AFV, with a little something to make it unique. It was then, one sunny afternoon that the crazy idea came to allow ONI AFV officers numbers bonuses.

As of today, the name of John Priest still summons that smirk on the face of those who worked on designing him.
In ten years time, when a new generation on little ONI consumers will ask “What was it like during the 2009 credit crunch?”, I’ll show them the miniature of John Priest, humanity’s most dangerous sales rep.